In order to prepare yourself here is a link to get started with Autodesk InfraWorks 2014: www.autodesk.com/infraworks-training-guide-2014-enu. Have a look and experience how easy it is to create your own model. Get your hands on InfraWorks and come to AU to get into exchange with us.

10/02/2013

How do you start creating a model in Autodesk®
InfraWorks™? What I like to do first is find, download, and import some terrain
data. The resources for harvesting this kind of data are diverse and may have
changed since the last time you checked.

Some websites offer free downloads, some priced,
of sets of elevation data, orthoimagery, building footprints, roads, municipal
boundaries, and other geospatial data, in a range of quality and resolution.1 Some formats you’ll find useful, and some you won’t. Some data sets
are new, some are out of date.

To help you cut
through the noise and grab just the data you want for your InfraWorks model,
WeoGeo® curates the InfraWorks
Data Market on WeoGeo.com, providing attractively
priced data sets to help you imagine, design, and create in 3 dimensions in
InfraWorks.

In InfraWorks 2014 or InfraWorks 360 Pro, before
you open a model, click WeoGeo. It’s under Find Model Data.

A page like this will open:

On WeoGeo, tell the
InfraWorks Data Market where in the world you’re interested in. This video gives some good
pointers for using this resource.

…then navigating to
the files that you’ve saved, and double-clicking each file. Once imported, back
on the Data Sources panel, you can double-click each imported file to configure
it and you’re on your way. Easy peasy.

09/12/2013

Tim Corey of Delta Engineering Systems has
developed a workflow to paint 90-degree parking stripes in InfraWorks™.

You’ll need AutoCAD®
Civil 3D® to perform this workflow.

In C3D, make a polyline that has width and is the length of your parking stripe. (For best results, create your C3D file using metric values.)

Extrude the polyline by 0.01 or some small amount so that it becomes a 3D object. FBX Export that object.

In InfraWorks, add to one of your style libraries (for example, City Furniture) the FBX file that represents the stripe.

Add
that new model as a decoration within the Road Style Group that is the
parking lane. Tim advises that you make sure to select the correct bucket and expand the length
of the dialog so that you can adjust the scale and the rotation about the Z axis.

Draw roads and
highways using as many clicks as needed; intersections form
automatically and are tidied up automatically with nice, rounded corners. An
intersection vanishes automatically if you drag one of the roads away from it.

Intersections
and curves update on the fly when you select them and choose what speed and classes
of vehicles they’re rated for based on AASHTO standards.

Roads and
highways can have multiple x, y, and z locations.

Here is a demo:

Politicians have speechwriters, talk show hosts have joke
writers, and I get to harvest insights, knowledge, and pictures from our
awesome dev team, resellers, and users all around the planet. Very much
enjoying learning by curating.

08/28/2013

Typically,
you’ll have pipe connectors spaced at intervals along a pipeline. Now you can
realign your pipeline by selecting and dragging one or more of the connectors
in the pipeline. As you drag a connector around, the pipes adjust, moving
around as necessary to stay snapped to the connector. No more manually dragging
the pipeline segments to reconnect them every time you reposition a connector.

(No, you might not want to put a pipeline where cars go.)

I don’t know
about you, but this enhancement inspired me to write a bad poem:

08/27/2013

We’ve improved terrain
grading in InfraWorks. Level sites for efficient site planning and preliminary
design of proposed buildings, for example.

On the
Create/Edit Features tool strip, click this button:

Draw a rough
outline of the site to be regraded, and make any desired refinements. Then
simply right-click to select a coverage. “Shape Terrain” lets you flatten a
coverage and set the elevation of that coverage, either by dragging the
vertical arrow grip (with a preview) to the desired elevation or by typing the
desired value. All vertices on the coverage boundary are then set to this value.

You can further
refine the site grading. Edit the individual vertex values either by clicking
on the coverage again or by right-clicking and selecting “Edit vertices.”

08/22/2013

Let’s say you’ve defined a surface in Civil 3D, including alignments for some roads.

In Civil 3D, a road with an x and y location cannot have more than one z location. In InfraWorks, it can.

So maybe you’d like to add some z locations to your Civil 3D roads, or make other tweaks to them, in InfraWorks, but want everything to end up in Civil 3D.

One way to do this is with the InfraWorks Data Sources panel ( Home > Import > Data Sources ); import the desired Civil 3D data as an .imx file.

(If you wish, you can control styling during the import. The default option tries to make the imported corridor look as close to Civil 3D as possible, including any textured material that was applied in Civil 3D. This means that there will not actually be a visible InfraWorks road feature for it, but the corridor will be represented as a series of coverage areas instead. The options in the import dialog let you import the corridor as a centerline + surface or as a centerline only. Either way, you’ll get a road feature that you can style in InfraWorks using native InfraWorks road styles.)

If you prefer to export the data just so it’s ready for later import into InfraWorks, you can do that in Civil 3D. From the ribbon, it’s Output > Export IMX.

Once you bring the .imx version of the roads (or other surfaces) into InfraWorks, you can add z locations to your heart’s content and save the roads in .imx format. Then, in Civil 3D, you can go Insert > Import IMX, import the file…

…and — voila! — the roads retain the refined alignments you gave them in InfraWorks.

Upon import into Civil 3D, the .imx contains three surfaces: base, existing, and proposed. The base surface is just the base terrain. The existing surface contains the base terrain plus any roads imported in bulk from GIS data. The proposed surface contains only areas affected by features created using InfraWorks’ drawing tools. The .imx also includes road centerlines which will be mapped to siteless alignments in Civil 3D. Importing the same .imx multiple times will overwrite existing surfaces and alignments with the same names, so you can change your mind, tweak the data in InfraWorks, and reimport it into the same Civil 3D drawing.

If you find that there is some detail that .imx is not handling to your satisfaction, try importing or exporting in LandXML format instead.

08/20/2013

Does your project (for example, an airport, campus, or highway project) have its own peculiar geospatial coordinate system instead of a widely used standard one like LL84?

An Autodesk customer conformed its local project coordinate systems across all project users’ computers so that Map 3D, Civil 3D, and InfraWorks users were able to access all relevant data on the project and were able to present their work in any of the project’s coordinate systems.

In AutoCAD Map 3D, you can customize your own coordinate system and it will be reflected in InfraWorks and Civil 3D as well (if you’re running the same version of each app); the applications share the coordinate system dictionary. Alternatively, you can customize your project’s coordinates in InfraWorks: Insert the data at the known location by using the various placement options in the data import dialog — though that may require manual entry of a placement offset. Leave the InfraWorks model’s coordinate system as LL (latitude-longitude); InfraWorks will account for the curvature of the earth, as it does for all models already. For the model itself, a global system like LL84 ensures maximum portability/interoperability of the model with some of our planned future workflows. For data import, reporting, and display, any geospatial coordinate system is fine, including custom ones.

But what if you’re running a different version of each app? Or multiple versions of one or more of these apps? Here’s what to do. Manually copy the coordinate system definitions to the correct folder. The definitions are normally stored in the C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\Geospatial Coordinate Systems folder. If you have multiple versions of Map 3D, Civil 3D, or InfraWorks installed, you will notice multiple folders:

In such a case, you may not see the custom definitions created in Map 3D or Civil 3D in InfraWorks. To remedy that, you can copy and paste (make a backup first!) the definitions from one Geospatial Coordinate Systems folder into another (matching the version of InfraWorks); InfraWorks will then pick up these custom definitions. This approach can also be used to collaborate with other users on other machines as long the contents of the Geospatial Coordinate Systems folder are also copied and pasted on those machines.

Protip: With regard to raster layers, if you are using custom coordinate systems created in Map 3D, you cannot collaborate on that model (in other words, sync to the cloud and download to another machine), since the custom coordinate system cannot be embedded and transferred.

08/12/2013

For InfraWorks 2014 R2, we have moved translation and processing of twocomplex files types, Revit (RVT) and CityGML, to the secure Autodesk cloudenvironment. What this means is that in order to import RVT and CityGMLfiles directly into InfraWorks 2014 R2 you must be connected to the internetand signed into InfraWorks using your Autodesk 360 credentials. It is alsoimportant to note that we DO NOT store your files in the cloud for any extendedperiod of time. Instead, using HTTPS we upload RVT and CityGML files forthe translation, whereupon we delete these files once the translation has beencompleted. The entire process is transient and secure.

This exciting advancement not only speeds up translation time by usingthe power of the cloud, it also means that InfraWorks uses less disk drivestorage and memory. Furthermore, you no longer need to have a local copyof Autodesk Revit installed on the same machine as InfraWorks.